javier wrote:do you enjoy it for its psychological effects or just for the taste?

Both, but more for taste than buzz or mental clarity or supposed health benefits. I just really enjoy the taste and the experience of brewing and drinking. I also like drinking something warm/hot, and I am too sensitive to coffee to drink multiple cups per day. Cocoa is out because I don't really do milk, plus the calories.

javier wrote:what do you like to do afterwards?

I drink tea all day, every day. So I do anything and everything afterward. The one thing I consistently do is pee.

I started drinking tea (with great frequency) only in the last 6 months when I decided it was time to kick the coffee habit. I could only consume coffee with large amounts of sugar and milk, which is seriously unhealthy!! But I still wanted a bit of caffeine to carry me through the day, so I started drinking loose leaf teas, instead of just grocery store bagged tea. Now I'm totally hooked! There is so much tasty variety, and so much culture in tea.

Also, a major bonus that tea offers is the various health benefits, which coffee lacks!

Initially I thought most tea was what was sold in supermarkets. When I found out that the world of tea is so huge, with so many different flavors to try I really wanted to explore that world. Curiosity got the best of me.

Another reason was I wanted the benefits and wanted to stop drinking coffee, which is when I gave up coffee completely and moved to tea, which was a little over a year ago.

Now tea adds flavor to all aspects in my life. I wake up every morning looking forward to my cups of tea, come back from work ready to sip some more, and sometimes I drink more in the early evening to help me relax. Best of all, I find tea is my way of meditating, since sometimes when I drink tea that is all that I am doing and it's just the tea and my thoughts.

With tea, there is always something to look forward to, whether it's tomorrow's morning cup, the next new tea I'll discover or the teaware and accessories that are just waiting to be found ^_^

I started to seriously drink tea earlier this year. It started surreptitiously by asking a Chinese colleague what were the leaves, what kind of tea, was in his tall glass on his desk. And then he gave me some mao feng and tie guan yin, that he gotten recently from China.

What was first striking was the smell and taste. So rich.

Just before that I got as a gift some 'yunnan black tea' which I liked. So I asked what was that tea that smells like mushrooms and found out about pu-erh.

The rest I got from the internet, notably Wikipedia for starters.

And then the Japanese teas which I "discovered by myself" and would complete so far my range of teas: Chinese green, oolong, and pu-erh, and Japnase green teas and matcha. I still have to try some black (which is not from supermarket) and white/yellow teas.

Ah, after several months of tea drinking only, coffee kicked itself out of the picture. The only thing I had to do was to actuall brew a cup as I always did before, freshly ground and using a French press. I could not finish the cup as it tasted heavily thick and awful. But that was how I always drank coffee before.

Recently I'm getting into the buzz thing and am paying attention to teas according to their buzz factor, as I like to have the first 2-3 small cups of the day with a buzz potency.

As an anecdote, recently I forgot for quite some time some organic bi luo chun in the yixing teapot, being drawn to other things. When I remembered, I poured the cup and it was of an almost menacing dark yellow/green colour. It was extremely bitter. So I thought of throwing it away and steep another one. But then I remembered the Turkish way of doing tea in which they work with tea concentrates diluted with plain hot water. So I took a few more sips and then filled the glass with hot water and proceeded like that to finish the cup. A few more sips, a bit more water added. The buzz was unbelievable. Almost second-state inducing. Never had a buzz like that on coffee. So I discovered that there's really a buzz potential with tea and I'm gauging that now.

In general, I find that tea activates the mind with better concentration skills than several cups of coffee. Coffee tend to provoke a state in which boost is high but concentration is dissipated. Whereas with tea boost can be a bit less, but concentration is high. In my field of work, this is important.

I drink tea because I used to drink lots of coffee, and the caffeine would get to me sometimes. Give me the shakes, stomach aches, etc. So for a while I stopped drinking coffee, then started again later.

They usually say caffeine is good for headaches, but I found coffee just GAVE me headaches, and once I stopped drinking it again (this time for good) I never got random headaches again...only time I get headaches now is if I'm sick.

I wanted to something to replace coffee, well not so much the coffee but the ritual of coffee, which I would have after meals. So I started with tea (crappy bagged stuff) and found some decent Stash teabags, which got me turned on to green tea, and then later to loose tea, and then to Adagio, and then to here, and then...

Before coming to Adagio I only knew of the tea sold in markets. It was nasty to me plain so I would always load the sugar/milk. It's refreshing to drink tea that actually tastes good plain. Coffee is okay, I just prefer tea taste-wise and because it's less harsh on my system.